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Monday, 19 February 2018

This year I inherited a Year 6 class who have done three years of French but no Spanish. As they have done lots of French I am able to move them on pretty quickly, showing them how the grammatical notions that they know from English and French - number and gender - work in Spanish.

At the moment we are working on adjectival agreement with plural nouns. So we know how to identify a masculine noun and a feminine noun and how we need to change some of our adjectives when describing something feminine. We have read Los limones no son rojos which has lots of examples of plural adjectival agreement in action. The children can explain to me why there is an extra s on some of the adjectives and why some of them also have an a instead of an o on the end.

I have designed the above Trash or Treasure? activity for the first lesson back after half term to make them think about what exactly shows that a word is masculine or feminine, singular or plural. The words are a collection of nouns, adjectives and articles/determiners. It’s not vital for students to understand the meanings of all the words - you are training them here to look for the clues that tell you about a word’s gender and number.

Each pair of students will need a set of the words and a Trash or Treasure board. The following sorts are suggested:

Words that are definitely masculine

Words that are definitely feminine

Words that could potentially be either masculine or feminine

Words that are singular

Words that are plural

Masculine singular words

Feminine singular words

Masculine plural words

Feminine plural words

Which words would you put in these different groups? Can you think of any other sorts that could be done using these words?

Friday, 16 February 2018

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of spelling. I asked if it was more important to spell accurately or to get your message across with some errors. I included a list of the words in French, Spanish and German that are commonly misspelled by students.Over the last few weeks I have been looking more closely at the issue of spelling in the new language. While it's true that a considerable number of spelling errors are a result of carelessness, many others can be ascribed to the interference of English.By the time students start to learn a new language in Year 3, they have undergone four years of rigorous training in English spelling and phonics. The new language has different letter clusters and sequences, but the students can, often unconsciously, replace these patterns with more familiar English spelling patterns. The four formative years of learning English spelling is enough to build a muscle memory, so that it feels more natural, for example, for a student to write rough than rouge, as the -ough letter cluster occurs in some frequently-used English words and the -ouge cluster is unfamiliar to English native speakers.Spelling errors of any kind are exasperating for the languages teacher, especially when they are of the je m'apple variety which turn up again and again. A systematic learning of phonics is one of the keys to ensuring more accurate spelling in the new language, but do we also owe it to our students to anticipate the sorts of errors that they are likely to make due to the interference of English and practise these words in a more focussed way? It is worth noting that this interference may also come from other languages that the student has learned, for example if they are in Year 7 and starting a language that is not the one they studied in Key Stage 2. Any new language will have combinations of letters that are entirely unfamiliar to the beginner student and which they will need to practise in order to build their confidence and to start to build the new muscle memory.We already draw direct comparisons with English in order to teach grammatical structures such as adjectival word order and the genitive, so should we now extend this to spelling?Many thanks to the members of the Secondary MFL Matters Facebook group who joined in the discussion about this recently and who also provided many of the examples below:

FRENCH:

French word

often misspelled as

reason?

amusant

amusement

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘amusement’

anniversaire

anniversarie

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘anniversary’

blanc

blank

students
remember the meaning of blanc by associating it with the English ‘blank’ but
this in turn means that the word is often written to make the word look more
like the more familiar English

bleu

blue

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English.

copain

complain

-m-
probably added because of the influence of the English ‘companion’

danse

dance

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

déteste

detest

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

équitation

equation

the
word is obviously unusual looking (and hard to spell/say for an
English-speaking learner) so it is corrected to the nearest known English
word

heures

hueres

-ue- is
much more common in English than -eu-

histoire

historie

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

il

ill

the
nearest known English word

intéressant

interestant

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

je
m’appelle

je
m’apple

the
nearest known English word

magique

magic

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

maison

mansion

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

manger

manager

the
nearest known English word

montagne

montange

-gne
words often cause problems for English-speaking learners, as -nge is a much
more common letter sequence in English than -gne.

natation

nation

the
nearest known English word

neuf

nerf

apart
from the obvious phonic influence, some of the influence will come from the
well known Nerf guns….

oui

qui

these
three vowels are never seen together in English. It’s much more common to have q+u and then
another vowel.

rouge

rough

English
words ending -ough are quite common, hence the change to the nearest known
English word.

vacances

vacancies

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

vingt

vinght

-gt is
not an English word ending, but there are quite a few words (eight, knight
etc) that end with -ght, hence the correction

SPANISH:

Spanish word

often misspelled as

reason?

centro
comercial

centro
commercial

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

difícil

diffícil

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

favorito

favourito

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

fútbol

fútball

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

geografía

geographía

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

me
encanta

me
enchanta

the
nearest known English word

seis

sies

rigorous
application of the “i before e except after c” rule!

tecnología

technología

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

vamos

vamous

few
English words end with -os, so this is often written with an -ous ending,
which is more familiar, from words such as famous

veinte

viente

rigorous
application of the “i before e except after c” rule!

GERMAN:

German word

often misspelled as

reason?

es ist
windig

es ist
winding

-ig as
a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much
more common -ing ending

Katze

Catze

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

langweilig

langweiling

-ig as
a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much
more common -ing ending

lernen

learnen

written
to make the word look more like the more familiar English

nicht

night

the
nearest known English word

Schwimmbad

Schwimmenbad

the
extra -en- is added to make it resemble more closely the English ‘swimming pool’.

Monday, 15 January 2018

I have been reading today about when and how primary children in France learn to write. One link I followed led me to this document, which is about finding opportunities for children to write. One of the suggestions is Phrase du jour. It is suggested that children decide, as a group, what the phrase du jour will be, and that they then discuss together and prepare orally how that sentence will be written. They then write the sentence individually. It is also suggested that all the phrases du jour are kept, to show the children's progression in writing over the year.

Later on this afternoon, in Sainsbury's, I was thinking that this could be something that we could adapt for use in the languages classroom. We always do our bit in Key Stage 2 Languages by reinforcing handwriting, punctuation and other aspects of grammar, and this could be another vehicle for that. It could also be useful for "bell work", in other words something that children can be doing when they first come into the room, while the register is being done, books are being given out and so on.

The way I currently see it working is that the children copy from the board a sentence comprising words and structures in the target language that the class is working on currently, and possibly a translation of this sentence in English. The collection of phrases du jour would then become a useful reference tool as well as an indication of the learning and progression that has taken place and the improvements in presentation and handwriting. It would probably need a separate exercise book that they could keep for the four years of Key Stage 2.

I am honoured to have been asked to be the consultant on the series for the BBC. I prepared the teacher's notes and have made a translation of each episode to provide as much support as possible for time-poor primary teachers.

Thursday, 11 January 2018

A few years ago I wrote What's in the box?, a post with some ideas for using empty or not-empty boxes to stimulate language work. Today I actually tried it out!!

I've been working on gender of nouns (animals in particular) with my new Y6 Spaniards, moving on to description of these singular nouns using adjectives of colour. I wanted them to have a go at some descriptions on whiteboards before writing anything formally in their books. I set up these PowerPoint slides, which show an empty cardboard box. I asked the children to decide which animal was in the box and which colour it was. They had to write their description on their whiteboard and hold it up for me to see. Then I clicked the slide to reveal what was in fact in the box.

Doing five of these meant that I could spot common errors such as putting the adjective in the wrong place, putting the wrong article, not agreeing the adjectives and so on. All the children became more confident and faster with their writing the more we did. It also turned out to be immensely motivating, especially for the boys. They all seemed to enjoy putting daft colours with the animal words.